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P. B. Shelley's poem is an invocation to the power of the west wind. The poet associates with it, the power of nature as well as the transcendental world of the divine. The divine order for Shelley is a matter of power. Throughout the poem, Shelley sees the 'unseen presence' of the west wind in terms of a revolutionary force that gets rid of the old thoughts and ushers in the new. The idea is carried through the image of the dead leaves which are taken to their graves by the chariot of the wind until in spring, winged seeds sprout to new life. It is in this way that the wind is both a destroyer and a preserver. It is a celebration of the new year, waiting to arrive and mourns the passing away of the old. The locks of the approaching storm in the wake of the wind is compared to the fierce locks of Maenad. The wind is the figure of inspiration for the poet. He wants to imbibe from it, the revolutionary sparkles and scatter it across humankind. The wind awakens the sea from its slumber where it had been dreaming of old palaces and towers which tremble on the surface of the water. The wind is fearfully dominant and the poet only wants to play second fiddle to him, knowing well after the passing away of his youthful arrogance that it is impossible to match its prowess.
The poem Ode to the West Wind consists of five cantos written in terza rima. Each canto consists of four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter. The poem begins with three cantos describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. The last two cantos are Shelley speaking directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, a cloud or a wave and make him its companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas. The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far.
Interpretation of the poem The poem Ode to the West Wind can be divided in two parts: the first three cantos are about the qualities of the ‘Wind’ and end each with the invocation ‘Oh hear!’. The last two cantos give a relation between the ‘Wind’ and the speaker.
First Canto The first stanza begins with the alliteration ‘wild West Wind’(1.1). The form of the apostrophe makes the wind also a personification. However, one must not think of this ‘Ode’ as an optimistic praise of the wind; it is clearly associated with autumn. The first few lines contain sinister elements, such as ‘leaves dead’ (l. 2), the aspect of death being highlighted by the inversion which puts ‘dead’ (l. 2) at the end of the line. These leaves haunt as ‘ghosts’ (l. 3) that flee from something that panics them. ‘chariotest’ (l. 6) is the second person singular. The ‘corpse within its grave’ (l. 8) in the next line is in contrast to the ‘azure sister of the Spring’ (l. 9) – a reference to the east wind – whose ‘living hues and odours’ (l.12) evoke a strong contrast to the colors of the fourth line
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of the poem that evoke death. In the last line of this canto the west wind is considered the ‘Destroyer’ (l. 14) because it drives the last signs of life from the trees, and the ‘Preserver’ (l.14) for scattering the seeds which will come to life in the spring.
Second Canto The second canto of the poem is much more fluid than the first one. The sky’s ‘clouds’ (l. 16) are ‘like earth’s decaying leaves’ (l. 16). They are a reference to the second line of the first canto (‘leaves dead’, l. 2).They also are numerous in number like the dead leaves. Through this reference the landscape is recalled again. The ‘clouds’ (l. 16) are ‘Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean’ (l. 17). This probably refers to the fact that the line between the sky and the stormy sea is indistinguishable and the whole space from the horizon to the zenith is covered with trailing storm clouds. The ‘clouds’ can also be seen as ‘Angels of rain’ (l. 18). In a biblical way, they may be messengers that bring a message from heaven down to earth through rain and lightning. These two natural phenomena with their “fertilizing and illuminating power” bring a change. Line 21 begins with ‘Of some fierce Maenad ...’ (l. 21) and again the west wind is part of the second canto of the poem; here he is two things at once: first he is ‘dirge/Of the dying year’ (l. 23f) and second he is “a prophet of tumult whose prediction is decisive”; a prophet who does not only bring ‘black rain, and fire, and hail’ (l. 28), but who ‘will burst’ (l. 28) it. The ‘locks of the approaching storm’ (l. 23) are the messengers of this bursting: the ‘clouds’. Shelley also mentions that when the West Wind blows, it seems to be singing a funeral song about the year coming to an end and that the sky covered with a dome of clouds looks like a 'sepulchre' i.e. a burial chamber or grave for the dying year or the year which is coming to an end. Shelley in this canto “expands his vision from the earthly scene with the leaves before him to take in the vaster commotion of the skies”. This means that the wind is now no longer at the horizon and therefore far away, but he is exactly above us. The clouds now reflect the image of the swirling leaves; this is a parallelism that gives evidence that we lifted “our attention from the finite world into the macrocosm”. The ‘clouds’ can also be compared with the leaves; but the clouds are more unstable and bigger than the leaves and they can be seen as messengers of rain and lightning as it was mentioned above.
Third Canto This refers to the effect of west wind in the water. The question that comes up when reading the third canto at first is what the subject of the verb ‘saw’ (l. 33) could be. On the one hand there is the ‘blue Mediterranean’ (l. 30). With the ‘Mediterranean’ as subject of the canto, the “syntactical movement” is continued and there is no break in the fluency of the poem; it is said that ‘he lay, / Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,/Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, / And saw in sleep old palaces and towers’ (l. 30–33). On the other hand it is also possible that the lines of this canto refer to the ‘wind’ again. Then the verb that belongs to the ‘wind’ as subject is not ‘lay’, but the previous line of this canto, that says ‘Thou who didst waken ... And saw’ (l. 29, 33). But whoever – the ‘Mediterranean’ or the ‘wind’ – ‘saw’ (l. 33) the question remains whether the city one of them saw, is real and therefore a reflection on the water of a city that really exists on the coast; or the city is just an illusion. Pirie is not sure of that either. He says that it might be “a creative you interpretation of the
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billowing seaweed; or of the glimmering sky reflected on the heaving surface”. Both possibilities seem to be logical. To explain the appearance of an underwater world, it might be easier to explain it by something that is realistic; and that might be that the wind is able to produce illusions on the water. With its pressure, the wind “would waken the appearance of a city”. From what is known of the ‘wind’ from the last two cantos, it became clear that the ‘wind’ is something that plays the role of a Creator. Whether the wind creates real things or illusions does not seem to be that important. Baiae's bay (at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples) actually contains visible Roman ruins underwater (that have been shifted due to earthquakes.) Obviously the moss and flowers are seaweed. It appears as if the third canto shows – in comparison with the previous cantos – a turningpoint. Whereas Shelley had accepted death and changes in life in the first and second canto, he now turns to “wistful reminiscence [, recalls] an alternative possibility of transcendence”. From line 26 to line 36 he gives an image of nature. But if we look closer at line 36, we realise that the sentence is not what it appears to be at first sight, because it obviously means ‘so sweet that one feels faint in describing them’. This shows that the idyllic picture is not what it seems to be and that the harmony will certainly soon be destroyed. A few lines later, Shelley suddenly talks about ‘fear’ (l. 41). This again shows the influence of the west wind which announces the change of the season.
Fourth Canto Whereas the cantos one to three began with ‘O wild West Wind’ (l. 1) and ‘Thou...’ (l. 15, 29) and were clearly directed to the wind, there is a change in the fourth canto. The focus is no more on the ‘wind’, but on the speaker who says ‘If I...’ (l. 43f). Until this part, the poem has appeared very anonymous and was only concentrated on the ‘wind’ and its forces so that the author of the poem was more or less forgotten. Pirie calls this “the suppression of personality” which finally vanishes at that part of the poem. It becomes more and more clear that what the author talks about now is himself. That this must be true, shows the frequency of the author’s use of the first-person pronouns ‘I’ (l. 43, 44, 48, 51, 54), ‘my’ (l. 48, 52) and ‘me’ (l. 53). These pronouns appear nine times in the fourth canto. Certainly the author wants to dramatise the atmosphere so that the reader recalls the situation of canto one to three. He achieves this by using the same pictures of the previous cantos in this one. Whereas these pictures, such as ‘leaf’, ‘cloud’ and ‘wave’ have existed only together with the ‘wind’, they are now existing with the author. The author thinks about being one of them and says ‘If I were a ...’ (l. 43ff). Shelley here identifies himself with the wind, although he knows that he cannot do that, because it is impossible for someone to put all the things he has learned from life aside and enter a “world of innocence”. That Shelley is deeply aware of his closedness in life and his identity shows his command in line 53. There he says ‘Oh, lift me up as a wave, a leaf, a cloud’ (l. 53). He knows that this is something impossible to achieve, but he does not stop praying for it. The only chance Shelley sees to make his prayer and wish for a new identity with the Wind come true is by pain or death, as death leads to rebirth. So, he wants to ‘fall upon the thorns of life’ and ‘bleed’ (l. 54). At the end of the canto the poet tells us that ‘a heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d’ (l. 55). This may be a reference to the years that have passed and ‘chained and bowed’ (l. 55) the hope of the people who fought for freedom and were literally imprisoned. With this
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knowledge, the West Wind becomes a different meaning. The wind is the ‘uncontrollable’ (l. 47) who is ‘tameless’ (l. 56). One more thing that one should mention is that this canto sounds like a kind of prayer or confession of the poet. This confession does not address God and therefore sounds very impersonal. Shelley also changes his use of metaphors in this canto. In the first cantos the wind was a metaphor explained at full length. Now the metaphors are only weakly presented – ‘the thorns of life’ (l. 54). Shelley also leaves out the fourth element: the fire. In the previous cantos he wrote about the earth, the air and the water. The reader now expects the fire – but it is not there. This leads to a break in the symmetry.
Fifth Canto Again the wind is very important in this last canto. At the beginning of the poem the ‘wind’ was only capable of blowing the leaves from the trees. In the previous canto the poet identified himself with the leaves. In this canto the ‘wind’ is now capable of using both of these things mentioned before. Everything that had been said before was part of the elements – wind, earth and water. Now the fourth element comes in: the fire. There is also a confrontation in this canto: whereas in line 57 Shelley writes ‘me thy’, there is ‘thou me’ in line 62. This “signals a restored confidence, if not in the poet’s own abilities, at least in his capacity to communicate with [...] the Wind”. It is also necessary to mention that the first-person pronouns again appear in a great frequency; but the possessive pronoun ‘my’ predominates. Unlike the frequent use of the ‘I’ in the previous canto that made the canto sound self-conscious, this canto might now sound self-possessed. The canto is no more a request or a prayer as it had been in the fourth canto – it is a demand. The poet becomes the wind’s instrument – his ‘lyrce’ (l. 57). This is a symbol of the poet’s own passivity towards the wind; he becomes his musician and the wind’s breath becomes his breath. The poet’s attitude towards the wind has changed: in the first canto the wind has been an ‘enchanter’ (l. 3), now the wind has become an ‘incantation’ (l. 65). And there is another contrast between the two last cantos: in the fourth canto the poet had articulated himself in singular: ‘a leaf’ (l. 43, 53), ‘a cloud’ (l. 44, 53), ‘A wave’ (l. 45, 53) and ‘One too like thee’ (l. 56). In this canto, the “sense of personality as vulnerably individualised led to self-doubt” and the greatest fear was that what was ‘tameless, and swift, and proud’ (l. 56) will stay ‘chain’d and bow’d’ (l. 55). The last canto differs from that. The poet in this canto uses plural forms, for example, ‘my leaves’ (l. 58, 64), ‘thy harmonies’ (l. 59), ‘my thoughts’ (l. 63), ‘ashes and sparks’ (l. 67) and ‘my lips’ (l. 68). By the use of the plural, the poet is able to show that there is some kind of peace and pride in his words. It even seems as if he has redefined himself because the uncertainty of the previous canto has been blown away. The ‘leaves’ merge with those of an entire forest and ‘Will’ become components in a whole tumult of mighty harmonies. The use of this ‘Will’ (l. 60) is certainly a reference to the future. Through the future meaning, the poem itself does not only sound as something that might have happened in the past, but it may even be a kind of ‘prophecy’ (l. 69) for what might come – the future.
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At last, Shelley again calls the Wind in a kind of prayer and even wants him to be ‘his’ Spirit: he says: ‘My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’ (l. 62). Like the leaves of the trees in a forest, his leaves will fall and decay and will perhaps soon flourish again when the spring comes. That may be why he is looking forward to the spring and asks at the end of the last canto ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ (l. 70). This is of course a rhetorical question because spring does come after winter, but the "if" suggests that it might not come if the rebirth is strong and extensive enough, and if it is not, another renewal---spring---will come anyway. Thus the question has a deeper meaning and does not only mean the change of seasons, but is a reference to death and rebirth as well. It also indicates that after the struggles and problems in life, there would always be a solution. It shows us the optimistic view of the poet about life which he would like the world to know. It is an interpretation of his saying 'If you are suffering now, there will be good times ahead.' But the most powerful call to the Wind are the lines: "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!" Here Shelley is imploring---or really chanting to---the Wind to blow away all of his useless thoughts so that he can be a vessel for the Wind and, as a result, awaken the Earth.
Conclusion This poem is a highly controlled text about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change. This was a subject Shelley wrote a great deal about, especially around 1819, with this strongest version of it articulated the last famous lines of his "Defence of Poetry": "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Context Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Sussex family which eventually attained minor noble rank—the poet’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, received a baronetcy in 1806. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a member of Parliament and a country gentleman. The young Shelley entered Eton, a prestigious school for boys, at the age of twelve. While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher named
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William Godwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he became a fervent believer; the young man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness of his beliefs. Entering Oxford in 1810, Shelley was expelled the following spring for his part in authoring a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism—atheism being an outrageous idea in religiously conservative nineteenth-century England. At the age of nineteen, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern keeper, whom he married despite his inherent dislike for the tavern. Not long after, he made the personal acquaintance of William Godwin in London, and promptly fell in love with Godwin’s daughter Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he was eventually able to marry, and who is now remembered primarily as the author of Frankenstein. In 1816, the Shelleys traveled to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron, the most famous, celebrated, and controversial poet of the era; the two men became close friends. After a time, they formed a circle of English expatriates in Pisa, traveling throughout Italy; during this time Shelley wrote most of his finest lyric poetry, including the immortal “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark.” In 1822, Shelley drowned while sailing in a storm off the Italian coast. He was not yet thirty years old. Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, the generation that came to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling into middle age. Where the older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the younger generation (which also included John Keats and the infamous Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism, and their tragically short lives. Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he was only twenty-six years old. To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism meant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young (and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism and complacency as Wordsworth did), they have attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists. Shelley’s life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding, but it is important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that they obscure a poet’s individual character. Shelley’s joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics; his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenth century’s most significant writers in English.
Analysis The central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley’s treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarily
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sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness. Shelley’s intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He writes, A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art’s sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron’s pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes The Heroic, Visionary Role of the Poet In Shelley’s poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem “To Wordsworth” (1816), and this intense connection with the
8 natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” (1816). He has the power—and the duty—to translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry that the public can understand. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Shelley’s poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets in Shelley’s work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power isolates them from other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because they are persecuted by a tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class values. In the end, however, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations.
The Power of Nature Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to nature’s power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the “spirit of beauty” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in “Mont Blanc.” This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that nature’s power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelley’s delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side.
The Power of the Human Mind Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such poems as “The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” (1819) and “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature’s beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature. It is the imagination—or our ability to form sensory perceptions—that allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute nature’s power to God: the human role in shaping nature damages Shelley’s ability to believe that nature’s beauty comes solely from a divine source.
Motifs Autumn Shelley sets many of his poems in autumn, including “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Ode to the West Wind.” Fall is a time of beauty and death, and so it shows both the creative and destructive powers of nature, a favorite Shelley theme. As a time of change, autumn is a fitting backdrop for Shelley’s vision of political and social revolution. In “Ode to the West Wind,” autumn’s brilliant colors and violent winds emphasize the passionate, intense nature of the poet, while the decay and death inherent in the season suggest the sacrifice and martyrdom of the Christ-like poet.
9 Symbols The West Wind Shelley uses the West Wind to symbolize the power of nature and of the imagination inspired by nature. Unlike Mont Blanc, however, the West Wind is active and dynamic in poems, such as “Ode to the West Wind.” While Mont Blanc is immobile, the West Wind is an agent for change. Even as it destroys, the wind encourages new life on earth and social progress among humanity.
Ode to the West Wind”
Summary The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a “destroyer and preserver,” hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying year,” and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him.
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The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, “the comrade” of the wind’s “wandering over heaven,” then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”—for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud—he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth. The speaker asks the wind to “make me thy lyre,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, “like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
Form Each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” contains five stanzas—four three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line does not; then the end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme for the first and third lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.
Commentary The wispy, fluid terza rima of “Ode to the West Wind” finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap beyond the scope of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and incorporating his own art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both “destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”—that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality—all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.
What are the Poetic devices of ode to the west wind? he West Wind is the object of the speaker's plea in this poem, the powerful force that could deliver him from his inability to make himself heard or to communicate his ideas to others. Blowing from the west suggests an association with the revolutionary, liberating aspects of the young United States, or perhaps simply a favorable wind for ships returning home to ports in Europe. Associated with autumn, the West Wind brings with it decay and the certainty of a wintry death, but it also makes a spring rebirth possible by clearing away the old dead leaves and planting seeds. •
Line 1: The West Wind is the object of an apostrophe at the beginning of this line. This is the first time, and by no means the last, that the speaker will apostrophize the
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wind. In fact, you could say that this whole poem is one long apostrophe. You might also notice the excessive alliteration in this line: "O wild West Wind" is a bit over the top. Lines 5-7: The West Wind is personified here as the charioteer of the "winged seeds" that it carries to their dormant rest in the earth during the winter. Shelley will continue to personify the wind throughout the poem, although it never becomes a fullydeveloped character.
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Line 14: The West Wind is described as "Destroyer and Preserver," which some scholars think is an allusion to the Hindu gods Siva and Vishnu. Line 14 also introduces the refrain of "Ode to the West Wind," "O hear!", which appears at the end of the first three cantos.
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Lines 18-23: The West Wind becomes part of a complex simile in these lines: the storm clouds spread across the "blue surface" of the wind are like a Mænad's locks of hair. We know this is a simile and not a metaphor because the word "Like" appears at the beginning of line 20.
Dead Leaves Dead leaves are referenced no less than five times in this short lyric poem. Dead leaves are the remnants of the previous season which the wind clears away; they're also a metaphorical representation of the pages of writing and poetry generated by the speaker, or perhaps even the author. Once ideas are put down on paper, they're printed on the "leaves" of a book. At that point, they seem to be declining. •
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Lines 2-5: The dead leaves are part of a complicated simile in these lines: dead leaves blown away by the wind are like ghosts running away from an enchanter. When Shelley lists the colors of the leaves as "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red," we detect an allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It's Death, of course, who rides the pale horse. Line 16: Here we learn that the clouds are "like Earth's decaying leaves." In the previous simile, the leaves were the main focus and the simile created an image that told us more about them; here, the clouds are the main focus and the leaves are used as an image that tells us more about them. Lines 64-66: The speaker compares his thoughts in a simile to "withered leaves," which is a pun on the two meanings of "leaves" - things that drop off trees, but also the pages of a book. Since the speaker himself is a poet who describes his plea to the West Wind as "the incantation of this verse" (65), the pun is even more obvious. However, because this is a very formal poem with heightened diction, we'd prefer to call this a "play on words" instead of a pun.
Funerals Although there aren't any literal funerals in "Ode to the West Wind," there's plenty of funereal imagery and symbolism. We've got dirges, corpses, the "dying year," a sepulcher, and ashes, just to name a few. Of course, they don't all come at once - they're spread throughout the poem as parts of different metaphors and trains of images. Taken all together, though,
12 9they make us feel like this poem is a kind of elegy (or lament) just as much as it's an ode. •
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Lines 5-12: In an extended simile, Shelley compares seeds to corpses lying in their graves. This is also an allusion to the Christian imagery of the Apocalypse, in which a "Last Trumpet" is blown (here, the Spring blows a "clarion," which is a kind of trumpet) in order to resurrect the bodies of the dead (here, the corpses of the seeds, which will come to life in the spring). For more on this, see "Quotes and Thoughts" under the theme "Mortality." Lines 23-28: This extended metaphor compares the West Wind to a dirge, the dying year to the dead man in a funeral, and the night sky to the dome of a sepulchre. Toward the end of the metaphor, Shelley's imagery breaks away from the strict correspondences of the metaphor, and both the wind and the inside of the sepulchre become stormy. It's almost as though, when the storm breaks, when "Black rain and fire and hail will burst," the metaphor is broken down from inside. Lines 65-67: The poem becomes a spell, or "incantation," by which the poet hopes to make the West Wind scatter his words, which are metaphorically described as "[a]shes and sparks." Some of the words have the power to light new metaphorical "fires" under other poets and thinkers, while others are already "dead."
The Æolian Harp The æolian harp was a common parlor instrument in the nineteenth century. Sort of like a wind chime, the æolian harp (or "æolian lyre" or "wind harp") was meant to be left in a windy spot, perhaps a window, so that the wind could play its own natural tunes on the instrument. For Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, the æolian harp came to represent the way that the individual poet could turn himself into an instrument that expressed something more universal about the natural world. In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley's speaker begs the West Wind to treat him as its lyre or trumpet or other instrument. • •
Lines 57-58: The speaker apostrophizes the West Wind, asking it to make him into a lyre. He actually wants to be turned into a passive instrument or object. Lines 59-61: Describing the "music" that the West Wind will draw from him as its instrument, the speaker characterizes its "harmonies" as in "tumult," a powerful paradox.
Bodies of Water Although "Ode to the West Wind" is mostly about, well, the wind, the middle of the poem moves away from the airy breezes and considers a different element: water. This slippage starts to happen in Canto II, where the wind is described as having a "stream" (15) and a "blue surface" (19), which makes it sound like a body of water. We're also reminded that the clouds being carried by the wind came originally from the water that evaporated from the ocean and that they'll rain back down into it. In the next canto, we learn how the wind wakes the Mediterranean Sea from his "summer dreams" (29) and chops up the surface of the
13 Atlantic Ocean. The water almost washes away the wind for a moment there - but the poem reminds us that the West Wind is always stronger than the calm, passive seas. •
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Lines 15-17: These lines combine intense imagery of the natural world with a complex extended metaphor. In the metaphor, "decaying leaves" falling from "tangled boughs" onto the earth are compared to the clouds that come from "Heaven and Ocean." In other words, the combination of Heaven, the sky with the sun in it, and Ocean, causes water to evaporate into the sky and form clouds. These clouds then float on the "stream" of the West Wind the way dead leaves float in a real stream. Line 28: Here the water that has evaporated from the ocean rains back down. To emphasize the violence and power of the storm, Shelley uses ten one-syllable words in this line, creating a strong, harsh sound as is read aloud.
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Lines 29-30: The Mediterranean Sea is personified here as a dreaming man, whom the wind can "waken" from "his summer dreams" (29).
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Lines 37-41: In three of these lines, the verb is placed at the end of the line. This creates an enjambment that drives the reader from one line to the next; this is rather like what's actually happening at this point in the poem: the Atlantic is splitting itself into "chasms" for the West Wind.
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Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is an example of an apostrophe because A. the author holds a one-way conversation with an object that cannot answer him. B. the first words of the poem include many of the same words that are in the title. C. his first stanza immediately addresses the underlying motif of his poem. D. the language he uses is an رabbreviated form of formal English
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The West Wind Symbol Analysis The West Wind is the object of the speaker’s plea in this poem, the powerful force that could deliver him from his inability to make himself heard or to communicate his ideas to others. Blowing from the west suggests an association with the revolutionary, liberating aspects of the young United States, or perhaps simply a favorable wind for ships returning home to ports in Europe. Associated with autumn, the West Wind brings with it decay and the certainty of a wintry death, but it also makes a spring rebirth possible by clearing away the old dead leaves and planting seeds. •
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Line 1: The West Wind is the object of an apostrophe at the beginning of this line. This is the first time, and by no means the last, that the speaker will apostrophize the wind. In fact, you could say that this whole poem is one long apostrophe. You might also notice the excessive alliteration in this line: "O wild West Wind" is a bit over the top. Lines 5-7: The West Wind is personified here as the charioteer of the "winged seeds" that it carries to their dormant rest in the earth during the winter. Shelley will continue to personify the wind throughout the poem, although it never becomes a fully-developed character.
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Line 14: The West Wind is described as "Destroyer and Preserver," which some scholars think is an allusion to the Hindu gods Siva and Vishnu. Line 14 also introduces the refrain of "Ode to the West Wind," "O hear!", which appears at the end of the first three cantos.
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Lines 18-23: The West Wind becomes part of a complex simile in these lines: the storm clouds spread across the "blue surface" of the wind are like a Mænad’s locks of hair. We know this is a simile and not a metaphor because the word "Like" appears at the beginning of line 20.
Dead Leaves Symbol Analysis Dead leaves are referenced no less than five times in this short lyric poem. Dead leaves are the remnants of the previous season which the wind clears away; they’re also a metaphorical representation of the pages of writing and poetry generated by the speaker, or perhaps even the author. Once ideas are put down on paper, they’re printed on the "leaves" of a book. At that point, they seem to be declining. • •
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Lines 2-5: The dead leaves are part of a complicated simile in these lines: dead leaves blown away by the wind are like ghosts running away from an enchanter. Line 16: Here we learn that the clouds are "like Earth’s decaying leaves." In the previous simile, the leaves were the main focus and the simile created an image that told us more about them; here, the clouds are the main focus and the leaves are used as an image that tells us more about them. Lines 64-66: The speaker compares his thoughts in a simile to "withered leaves," which is a pun on the two meanings of "leaves" – things that drop off trees, but also the pages of a book. Since the speaker himself is a poet who describes his plea to the West Wind as "the incantation of this verse" (65), the pun is even more obvious. However, because this is a very formal poem with heightened diction, we’d prefer to call this a "play on words" instead of a pun.
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Funerals Symbol Analysis Although there aren’t any literal funerals in "Ode to the West Wind," there’s plenty of funereal imagery and symbolism. We’ve got dirges, corpses, the "dying year," a sepulcher, and ashes, just to name a few. Of course, they don’t all come at once – they’re spread throughout the poem as parts of different metaphors and trains of images. Taken all together, though, 9they make us feel like this poem is a kind of elegy (or lament) just as much as it’s an ode. •
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Lines 5-12: In an extended simile, Shelley compares seeds to corpses lying in their graves. This is also an allusion to the Christian imagery of the Apocalypse, in which a "Last Trumpet" is blown (here, the Spring blows a "clarion," which is a kind of trumpet) in order to resurrect the bodies of the dead (here, the corpses of the seeds, which will come to life in the spring). For more on this, see "Quotes and Thoughts" under the theme "Mortality." Lines 23-28: This extended metaphor compares the West Wind to a dirge, the dying year to the dead man in a funeral, and the night sky to the dome of a sepulchre. Toward the end of the metaphor, Shelley’s imagery breaks away from the strict correspondences of the metaphor, and both the wind and the inside of the sepulchre become stormy. It’s almost as though, when the storm breaks, when "Black rain and fire and hail will burst," the metaphor is broken down from inside. Lines 65-67: The poem becomes a spell, or "incantation," by which the poet hopes to make the West Wind scatter his words, which are metaphorically described as "[a]shes and sparks." Some of the words have the power to light new metaphorical "fires" under other poets and thinkers, while others are already "dead."
Symbol Analysis The æolian harp was a common parlor instrument in the nineteenth century. Sort of like a wind chime, the æolian harp (or "æolian lyre" or "wind harp") was meant to be left in a windy spot, perhaps a window, so that the wind could play its own natural tunes on the instrument. For Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, the æolian harp came to represent the way that the individual poet could turn himself into an instrument that expressed something more universal about the natural world. In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley’s speaker begs the West Wind to treat him as its lyre or trumpet or other instrument. • •
Bodies of Water Symbol Analysis
Lines 57-58: The speaker apostrophizes the West Wind, asking it to make him into a lyre. He actually wants to be turned into a passive instrument or object. Lines 59-61: Describing the "music" that the West Wind will draw from him as its instrument, the speaker characterizes its "harmonies" as in "tumult," a powerful paradox.
16 Although "Ode to the West Wind" is mostly about, well, the wind, the middle of the poem moves away from the airy breezes and considers a different element: water. This slippage starts to happen in Canto II, where the wind is described as having a "stream" (15) and a "blue surface" (19), which makes it sound like a body of water. We’re also reminded that the clouds being carried by the wind came originally from the water that evaporated from the ocean and that they’ll rain back down into it. In the next canto, we learn how the wind wakes the Mediterranean Sea from his "summer dreams" (29) and chops up the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The water almost washes away the wind for a moment there – but the poem reminds us that the West Wind is always stronger than the calm, passive seas. •
•
Lines 15-17: These lines combine intense imagery of the natural world with a complex extended metaphor. In the metaphor, "decaying leaves" falling from "tangled boughs" onto the earth are compared to the clouds that come from "Heaven and Ocean." In other words, the combination of Heaven, the sky with the sun in it, and Ocean, causes water to evaporate into the sky and form clouds. These clouds then float on the "stream" of the West Wind the way dead leaves float in a real stream. Line 28: Here the water that has evaporated from the ocean rains back down. To emphasize the violence and power of the storm, Shelley uses ten one-syllable words in this line, creating a strong, harsh sound as is read aloud.
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Lines 29-30: The Mediterranean Sea is personified here as a dreaming man, whom the wind can "waken" from "his summer dreams" (29).
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Lines 37-41: In three of these lines, the verb is placed at the end of the line. This creates an enjambment that drives the reader from one line to the next; this is rather like what’s actually happening at this point in the poem: the Atlantic is splitting itself into "chasms" for the West Wind.
Ode to the West Wind Summary The speaker of the poem appeals to the West Wind to infuse him with a new spirit and a new power to spread his ideas. In order to invoke the West Wind, he lists a series of things the wind has done that illustrate its power: driving away the autumn leaves, placing seeds in the earth, bringing thunderstorms and the cyclical "death" of the natural world, and stirring up the seas and oceans. The speaker wishes that the wind could affect him the way it does leaves and clouds and waves. Because it can’t, he asks the wind to play him like an instrument, bringing out his sadness in its
17 own musical lament. Maybe the wind can even help him to send his ideas all over the world; even if they’re not powerful in their own right, his ideas might inspire others. The sad music that the wind will play on him will become a prophecy. The West Wind of autumn brings on a cold, barren period of winter, but isn’t winter always followed by a spring?
Ode to the West Wind Theme of Man and the Natural World In "Ode to the West Wind," Nature is grander and more powerful than man can hope to be. The natural world is especially powerful because it contains elements like the West Wind and the Spring Wind, which can travel invisibly across the globe, affecting every cloud, leaf, and wave as they go. Man may be able to increase his status by allowing Nature to channel itself through him.
Ode to the West Wind Theme of Transformation As the speaker of "Ode to the West Wind" feels himself waning and decaying, he begs the wind to use him as an instrument, inhabit him, distribute his ideas, or prophesy through his mouth. He hopes to transform himself by uniting his own spirit with the larger "Spirit" of the West Wind and of Nature itself.
Ode to the West Wind Theme of Mortality The West Wind in Shelley’s ode is depicted as an autumnal wind, preparing the world for winter. As a result, the poem is filled with images of death and decay, reminders of both natural and human mortality. The speaker hopes that the death of one world will be inevitably followed by a new rebirth and a new spring, but the poem leaves this rebirth uncertain.
Ode to the West Wind Theme of Language and Communication At the end of "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker betrays his deepest concern: the fate of his ideas. He hopes that his words and thoughts will be spread throughout the world. He’s not sure of the quality of his thinking, but at least it can provide a starting point for other thinkers.
